The New York Times and others have reported that ten Senators have joined Hawley in pledging to vote to steal the election for Trump. The eleven are a mix of Senators with presidential ambitions and newly elected freshmen Senators.
Let’s put the freshmen aside for the moment,and concentrate on the presidential aspirants. The question that arises is: Why are they doing this and will it work for them?
Each of them are perfectly aware of the following:
- They will not prevail in the Senate.
- Joe Biden was lawfully elected president and there is not a smidgen of evidence to the contrary.
So, first question: Why are they doing this?
They have each placed a bet that the presidential nominating contest in 2024 will be decided by the most brain dead of the base, the Trump dead-enders. They want to get the support of that base for 2024. This part is obvious. We can certainly exclude that they are doing this for any sort of principled reason, because see item 2 above.
Second question: Will it work?
This is the harder one to answer. When Hawley appeared to be acting alone, one could make the argument that he was positioning himself to get a lock on the brain dead vote, but now that his potential rivals have gotten in on the act, it is unclear that any will benefit vis a vis the others to any great extent. Perhaps that was Cruz’s thinking when he recruited the others. After all better to split the field at the start than to leave it to one guy.
But it seems to me that everyone of them is assuming something not in evidence: That Trump himself will not be a factor in 2024, either as a candidate himself or, as we see him today, someone intent on wreaking vengeance on Republicans who he believes have betrayed him by not stealing the election for him. Mind you, in his book, it’s not sufficient that they try to steal the election, it is only sufficient if they succeed. It would not surprise me at all if Trump spent 2024 tweeting out denigrating comments about folks like Cruz. After all, it’s not like he hasn’t done so in the past. And remember what Robert Vaughan’s villain in Superman III had to say: “It is not enough that I succeed, everyone else must fail”. Trump, not having been successful, may very well want to be sure that everyone else fails.
It is at least marginally possible that there will be a sufficient number of whackjob candidates in 2024 such that they split up the whackjob vote so much that a lesser whackjob, like the supremely hypocritical Ben Sasse, would sneak through to the nomination. He would then also have to face a barrage of tweets from the Donald which would dampen Republican turnout for Sasse, who is the type of candidate the “Never-Trumpers” would hail as the Messiah returning the Republican Party to its pre-2016 roots. You know, the fantasy party that didn’t cater to racists, religous bigots, and brainwashed Foxaholics while serving the interests of billionaires. For what it’s worth, my opinion is that the Republican Establishment will not be able to get the monster it has created back under control. Trump was not an anomaly, he is the Republican Party, but it remains to be seen whether any of the Senators lusting after his followers have what it takes to dish up the red meat they crave.
Speaking of the vote on the 6th, here’s a question. My wife did a bit of research and confirmed that the new Senate is sworn in tomorrow. That means that the terms to which Perdue and Loeffler were elected or appointed will have expired on that date. The results of the runoff on the fifth will not be known by the time the House and Senate meet to count the electoral ballots. How, then, do they get to cast a vote? Do they cast a vote?
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